MONTREAL — AtkinsRéalis Group Inc.’s nuclear business powered a 34 per cent year-over-year jump in profits last quarter, as the engineering company banks on the technology to seize on soaring demand for energy-hungry AI data centres.

The Montreal-based firm’s nuclear division now accounts for a quarter of total revenue versus 15 per cent two years ago, said CEO Ian Edwards. The segment boasted organic revenue growth of nearly 37 per cent to reach a quarterly record high of $737 million.

Preliminary work is now underway at Ontario’s Pickering nuclear power station after AtkinsRéalis and Aecon Group Inc. signed a $2.1-billion contract for a life extension on four reactors last year. Money is also rolling in from Romania, where the company secured a deal in 2025 to extend the life of a reactor at the Cernavoda nuclear plant — after winning a contract the year before to build two new multibillion-dollar reactors there.

Atkins’ ambitions go beyond traditional nuclear plants. In March, it announced it was teaming up with Nvidia to ramp up deployment of nuclear-powered artificial intelligence factories, as the two parties explore how to work the chipmaking giant’s technologies into developing the facilities.

“It’s opened the door to meetings with other hyper-scalers,” Edwards told analysts on a conference call Thursday, saying electricity production for the energy-intensive sites needs to increase tenfold.

“The issue is clearly electrical energy for data centres.”

Artificial intelligence factories amount to specialized data centres built for massive AI workloads. Unlike general-purpose data facilities, they develop, train and deploy AI models at an industrial scale, with power and cooling demands far greater than their smaller cousins.

A mid-size reactor built by Candu Energy — an AtkinsRéalis subsidiary that draws on nuclear technology licensed exclusively by the company from the federal government — takes about seven years to plan and build, Edwards said. That time frame is similar to the length of construction for a combined-cycle gas turbine, increasingly used to power AI data centres on site.

“That’s a big opportunity for us that we are looking to clearly exploit,” he said.

AtkinsRéalis’s engineering services segment, which covers sectors ranging from highway and rail infrastructure to defence and water management, saw weaker-than-expected profit margins in the first quarter, particularly in its American and Middle Eastern operations.

“The kind of headwind that we’re talking about there in the Middle East is actually not in connection with the conflict,” Edwards said, referring to the Iran war. Rather, it’s mainly because the company “repositioned” in Saudi Arabia to take on longer-term projects linked to the 2030 World Expo in Riyadh and the World Cup in 2034, he said.